A Respectable Trade

Frances started to plait her hair in a thick hank, ready for bed. The wedding dinner had been better than she could have hoped. Lord Scott had been as kind as always, although his cold unfriendly wife had cast a cool shadow over the proceedings. Frances had dreaded that Josiah would be rowdy and jolly but the evening had been as dignified as a funeral. Only Sarah and Josiah represented the Cole family so Frances’s other great fear – that there would be dozens of vulgar relations emerging from the Bristol woodwork – was stilled. The dinner had been well cooked, a little lavish for just the five of them. The wines – as you would expect in Bristol – had been excellent.

Frances had sat at the foot of the table in the tiny airless parlour and smiled without flinching. Everyone at the table knew that marriage to such a man as Josiah was not her first choice. Everyone at the table knew that she had no choice. The coldness in her heart was reflected in the cool serenity of her face.

Her calm had been threatened only once. When Lord Scott took her hand on leaving he had whispered to her: ‘God bless you my dear, it’s the best thing you could have done … considering.’ This tactful acknowledgement that she was orphaned and penniless sent a shiver through her. ‘I will pray it goes well for you,’ he said.

There would be nothing he could do for her if it did not. Frances was owned by Josiah, body and soul. She had promised to obey him till death.

‘But it will go well for me,’ she whispered. She tied her nightcap under her chin and crossed the cold floorboards to the bed. She had wept the night her father died. She had wept the first night that she had slept in a strange house, far from the country vicarage, and far below the genteel status of the vicar’s only daughter. She had raged then against the unfairness of a life in which a woman is dependent completely on a man. A woman who lacks a father must find a husband. Frances had not married when she should have done, in the brief bloom of her youth. She had aimed too high and her father had been too proud. He had not understood that a man, any man at all, was better than spinster hardship. Her father’s death abandoned Frances to loneliness and to poverty and to the unending slights of the life of a governess.

She got into the broad bed, and rested her head on the plain linen pillow. She would not cry tonight. She was a wife and she had a dinner table of her own, even though it was only a little table and pushed to one side in a tiny parlour. The rest of her life would be spent accommodating her desires to her husband’s fortune. If Josiah rose in the world she would rise with him; if he did not she must bear it with patience and be glad to have found such a haven as this little house. She pulled the covers over her shoulders as if the coldness in her spirit had chilled her very skin, despite the sultry night air. She felt as if tears or feelings would never touch her again. She was heartbroken and exhausted by heartbreak; and she mistook it for the calmness of old age.

There was a tap on the door between Josiah’s room and her own and her husband came in, carrying his candle. He was wearing a plain linen nightshirt. He set the candle down on the bedside table and stood, looking at her. He was clearly at a loss.

‘I hope you enjoyed the dinner,’ he said awkwardly.

Frances nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said in her cool level voice.

Josiah’s feet in Moroccan leather slippers shuffled on the wooden floor. He looked intensely uncomfortable. ‘The wines were good,’ he volunteered.

Frances nodded.

There was silence. Frances realised that Josiah was painfully embarrassed. Neither of them knew how a husband claimed his marital rights. Neither of them knew how a wife consented. Her dry little cough rose up in her throat and she cleared her throat.

‘It’s quite late now,’ Josiah remarked.

Frances turned back the covers. ‘Will you come to bed, husband?’ she asked, as coldly civil as if she were offering him a dish of tea.

Josiah flushed scarlet with relief. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He stepped out of his slippers and slid into bed beside her. They lay side by side for a moment, taking care not to touch each other, then Josiah leaned over and blew out both candles. Under cover of the sudden darkness he reared on top of Frances and pulled her nightdress out of his way. Frances lay still underneath him with her eyes closed and her teeth gritted. It was a duty which had to be done. Josiah fumbled awkwardly for a few moments and then he exclaimed in a whisper and moved away.

‘It’s no good,’ he said shortly. ‘I have drunk too much wine.’

Frances opened her eyes. She could see only the silhouette of his profile. She did not know what she was supposed to do.

‘It does not matter,’ he said, consoling himself rather than her. ‘It will come right in time. There is no need for us to hurry. After all, we neither of us married for desire.’

There was a long, rather chilling silence. ‘No,’ Frances acknowledged. ‘Neither of us did.’

‘Good morning, ma’am,’ a voice said, and the curtains rattled on the brass rail as the maid drew them back and tied them to the bed posts.

Frances stirred and opened her eyes. The maid who had waited at the dinner table last night was standing before her with a small silver tray bearing a jug of hot chocolate and a warm pastry. Frances sat up and received the tray on her knees.

‘Thank you.’

The maid dipped a curtsey.

‘Master said to tell you that he is gone out early,’ she said. ‘But Miss Cole expects you in the parlour as soon as you are dressed. She is there already.’

Frances nodded. She waited for the maid to leave the room and then bolted the food and gulped down the hot chocolate. She sprang from the bed and went over to the ewer of water to wash her face. Then she paused, remembering her new status. She was no longer the governess who had to hurry downstairs for fear of keeping the mistress waiting. Frances smiled at the thought and poured water into the bowl. She washed her face and patted it dry, enjoying the sense of leisure. Her clothes for the morning were laid out on the heavy wooden chest: a linen shift, a morning dress in white muslin, embroidered at the hem, with a frivolous silk apron to denote Frances’s intention of domestic work.

The dress was new. Lady Scott had given Frances whole bolts of fabric when the marriage contract was signed. Her entire wardrobe had been renovated and improved with gifts from her cousins and her aunt. Frances knew it was the last thing Lady Scott would ever do for her and she accepted the old gowns and yards of silk with nothing more than polite gratitude. Her husband would have to provide for her new clothes, and there was an allowance of pin money laid down in the marriage contract. Frances would never again darn and re-darn her silk stockings.

She slipped on the shift and turned as there was a tap on the door and the maid came in again. Frances sat at the dressing table and brushed her hair in steady sweeps of the silver-backed brushes, and the maid helped her plait it into two braids and pin them up on her head with a pretty scrap of lace for a cap. The woman was slow and not very skilful. She dropped the hairbrush.

‘I am sorry, Mrs Cole,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I don’t usually work as a lady’s maid.’

‘Does Miss Cole have her own maid?’

‘She dresses herself.’

Frances hid her surprise. She had never heard of a lady dressing herself, she wondered how Sarah managed with the small covered buttons at the back of a gown. Even as a governess Frances had borrowed a maid to do her hair and help with the fastenings. For the first time Frances had a glimpse of her tumble in status. The maid shook out the morning dress and held it for Frances to put on, fastening the two dozen mother-of-pearl buttons up the back of the dress, and tied the ribbon of the apron. Lastly she set out the little insubstantial slippers of pink silk.

‘Shall I show you to the parlour, ma’am?’

‘Yes,’ Frances said.

She followed the woman down the stairs. It was a dreadfully dark poky house, she thought, sandwiched between one large warehouse and another, with its front door giving directly on to the dock and its back door into a yard overhung by the glowering red sandstone cliff. The cliff was part of the building; the warehouse carved into its overhanging walls. The storerooms extended into caves deep inside it, running back for miles in a red sandstone labyrinth.

It was no house for a lady. It was crashingly noisy with the rolling of barrels on the cobbles of the quay. Costers and hawkers shrieked their wares, screaming to make themselves heard over the bawled orders on the unloading ships. Frances did not know if Josiah had a carriage and she did not know if she would be allowed to walk along the quayside outside her front door without endangering her reputation. She had a fine line to tread as the niece of a lord but the wife of a man whose house was no larger than a shop.

Bristol was not a genteel city; it was all port and no town, quaysides and no pavements. Every other street towards the town centre was a bridge with a river running beneath it. The town centre itself was crammed on the banks of the river with masts of sailing ships overtopping the chimneys, and the prows of the boats almost knocking on the doors. When the tide was full the boats rocked and bobbed and sailors in the rigging could see into bedroom windows and shout bawdy comments at the housemaids. When the tide was out the ships were dumped on the stinking mud of the harbour bottom and the garbage from the boats and the sewage from the town gurgled sluggishly around them.

The maid paused before the dark wooden parlour door, tapped lightly and stood aside. Frances turned the door handle and went in. Sarah Cole rose from her seat at the table, her face unsmiling under a plain morning cap.

‘No need to knock,’ she said coldly. ‘You are the mistress here now.’ She put her hand on a great ring of keys on the table. ‘These are the household keys. My brother has told me to offer them to you, if you wish to take the housekeeping into your own hands.’

Frances hesitated, and Sarah Cole gestured to an ominous pile of dark-backed ledgers. ‘Also the housekeeping books,’ she went on. ‘I think you will find them in order. I present them to my brother once a month for his signature. That will now be your task.’

‘Gracious,’ said Frances weakly.

The stern face of the older woman gleamed with pride. ‘It has been my life’s work to make this house run as smoothly as our trading company. The company books are no better than the household ones. I do them both.’

‘He must be very grateful to you,’ Frances said tentatively.

Miss Cole’s face was stern. ‘There is no reason why he should be,’ she replied. ‘I was doing my duty and protecting my fortune, as I trust you will do. It was my task to run the business and the housekeeping, for both my brother and for my Papa, for all these years ever since Mama died. Now it is my duty to hand the housekeeping accounts over to you.’

Frances went to the table and opened a ledger at random. It was written in perfect copperplate script:

‘To Mr Sykes, butcher … £3. 4s. 6d.’ Beneath it was another entry, and another and another for page after page.

Frances turned the pages. They fluttered with the petty cash of many years. ‘I have never done accounts,’ she confessed. ‘In my father’s house it was done by the cook. I merely checked the totals at the end of each month. I am afraid I don’t know how to do them.’

Miss Cole raised an eyebrow. ‘You must have been badly cheated,’ she said.

‘Oh, no! Cook had been with us since I was a baby. She was devoted to my father and to me. She would not have cheated us. She was like one of the family.’

Miss Cole shrugged. ‘I do not know about grand houses,’ she said. ‘I am a trader’s sister and a trader’s daughter. I do not have servants who are one of the family. I check their work and if I see an error then I sack them.’

‘It was hardly a grand house. It was a little country vicarage on Lord Scott’s estate.’